Caleb Gattegno

Notes from Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools the Silent Way

He talks about “the subordination of teaching to learning,” as SIT does. In order to understand the idea, he says, we must accept experimental lessons as the test of its validity.

The Silent Way (1963 initially), as with L1-learning, is not just imitation and practice. (Does this mean that Gattegno would have believed in aspects of the Natural Approach and the idea that we take cues from L1 learning in teaching L2?) Rather, we use “the tools of perception.” It is not the baby who repeats us, but we repeat the baby, who then repeats us. But they don’t necessarily imitate: that is, try to sound like us. They attend the melody of the language. They know that words cover classes of events and objects (nouns) before they learn particular events or objects. They don’t have anxiety about learning. Learning L1 is done without help from others.

Hmmm…. I’m confused. He’s talking about the importance of considering the way we learn L1, but then says, “We shall not score much success if we continue in that way [of a baby learning its mother tongue] since circumstances in the learner are on the whole incomparable with those…” And “a new language requires a new adaptation.”

He wants to replace a “natural” approach with an “artificial” and controlled one.

“I developed my techniques while subordinating my teaching to the learning…” I’m still not sure what this means. He transfers the responsibility for learning to his students. In contrast to a baby’s learning he uses as few nouns as possible (as Beverly did with “rod.”) No phonetic spelling. Little correcting or memorization (though I beg to differ). Recordings of of speech in foreign language used (rather than live speak?). Three texts: sentences to be read separately, sentences to be read consecutively; a book of stories; worksheets; anthologies; films. All designed for ages 7 and up.

Here’s a Fidel chart:

fidel